So no doubt the casualties suffered by Pakistani armed forces and the millions of displaced persons are also an illusion not to mention those illusory drones...
Cheers, k hanly
Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
--- On Sun, 6/21/09, Sujeet Bhatt <sujeet.bhatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Sujeet Bhatt <sujeet.bhatt at gmail.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] The demise of Pakistan is inevitable
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, June 21, 2009, 9:03 AM
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/14/pakistan-taliban-india-military
>
> The Guardian
>
> The demise of Pakistan is inevitable
> Its military establishment, hatred for India and history of
> injustice
> means Pakistan is a victim of the divisive logic that
> created it
>
> Kapil Komireddi
> guardian.co.uk, Sunday 14 June 2009 13.00 BST
>
>
> Pakistan's fight against the Taliban is an illusion. The
> world may
> view it as a battle for Pakistan's soul, but the generals
> in
> Rawalpindi, with whom real power rests, are not so sure. If
> they were,
> 200,000 of their finest fighters wouldn't be chewing grass
> on the
> eastern border with India while the so-called battle for
> Pakistan's
> survival rages on in the north-west.
>
> Blackmailing the world by threatening imminent collapse is
> vintage
> Pakistan. Recently, President Asif Ali Zardari told Der
> Spiegel that
> the safety of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal depended entirely
> upon how
> well the world supported democracy in his battered country.
> "If
> democracy in this country fails, if the world doesn't help
> democracy,"
> he warned, "then any eventuality is possible." Having
> placed the
> burden of Pakistan's recovery from the mire of its own
> making on the
> world's shoulders, Zardari listed the "help" that his
> government
> expected: "billions of dollars".
>
> But Pentagon documents released earlier this month give an
> alarming
> account of where the benignant billions of aid dollars
> poured into
> Pakistan's coffers over the last decade have ended up: on
> the most
> modern weaponry – combat aircraft, laser-guided kits,
> anti-ship
> missiles, air-to-air missiles – for use against India.
> Under the cloak
> of this conflict, Pakistan has equipped itself for battle
> with its
> traditional enemy, rapidly increasing its nuclear weapons
> at the same
> time.
>
> The Taliban's recent targets have unsettled their
> erstwhile
> paymasters, but nothing seems to deter Islamabad from
> continuing with
> its policy of patronising Islamic extremists – so long as
> they are
> devoted to destroying India. Punjab is littered with these
> groups. In
> Lahore last month, Yahya Mujahid told me that his group,
> the banned
> Jamat-ud-Dawah, would continue to fight against Indian rule
> in
> Kashmir. The operations "have gone somewhat cold", he
> admitted. But he
> spoke confidently and strode assuredly – a man who knew
> things would
> turn in his favour.
>
> Three weeks later, Hafiz Saeed, Jamat-ud-Dawah's leader,
> who had been
> detained after India produced several dossiers linking him
> to last
> November's Mumbai attacks, was freed. Among the reasons
> cited by the
> Lahore high court in ordering Saeed's release was this bolt
> from the
> blue: "The security laws and anti-terrorism laws of
> Pakistan are
> silent on al-Qaida being a terrorist organisation." The
> trial was a
> farce, a repetition of Pakistan's time-tested tactic of
> appearing to
> act against anti-India jihadis while not taking any action
> at all.
>
> Mani Shankar Aiyar once described Pakistan as a country
> "divided
> against itself, but united against India". From that
> delusional feudal
> megalomaniac Zulfi Bhutto's pledge to wage a "thousand-year
> war"
> against India to General Pervez Musharraf's desperate
> attempt in 1999
> to nuke it, hatred of India has been the constitutive sine
> qua non for
> Pakistan's survival. It is the one bugbear that makes
> Pakistanis out
> of Sindhis and Baluchis, Pathans and Punjabis.
>
> Many Pakistanis I spoke to agreed that their country has
> gone to the
> dogs. But Kashmir still evokes the romantic idea of a
> Muslim
> nationhood. Pakistan continues to be defined by the
> struggle that
> created it – a struggle founded upon the premise that
> Muslims and
> Hindus cannot co-exist in one nation. With all of India's
> social
> failings, its success at forging a nationality out of its
> diversity
> stands as a towering repudiation of this idea, and merely
> by being
> itself, impeaches the logic of partition. Pakistan cannot
> justify its
> existence as long as India accommodates religious
> diversity. It is not
> enough that Pakistan is a Muslim country: for its creation
> to be truly
> vindicated, the country it was carved out of must be Hindu.
> As long as
> Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state, remains part of India,
> Pakistan will
> view partition as unfinished business and itself as its
> incomplete
> product.
>
> But the Pakistan that was created in 1947 ceased to exist
> in 1971 with
> the creation of Bangladesh – in a manner that doesn't
> just cast deep
> moral questions on Pakistan's claim to speak for Kashmiri
> Muslims, but
> also offers an object lesson against indulging procrustean
> nationalisms, of which Pakistan remains a paragon. Created
> expressly
> to safeguard the Muslims of the subcontinent, Pakistan
> perpetrated the
> biggest genocide of Muslims since the arrival of Islam in
> south Asia.
> At least seven million East Pakistanis in what is now
> Bangladesh were
> slaughtered by West Pakistani soldiers within the space of
> a few
> months in 1971. The Islamic bond which animates Pakistan's
> jihadist
> policy in Kashmir was absent during this massacre. It was
> secular
> India, its forces led entirely by non-Hindus – a Muslim
> air marshal
> (Idris Latif), a Sikh commander of ground forces (JS
> Aurora), a Parsi
> chief of army (Sam Manekshaw), and a Jewish strategist and
> principal
> negotiator (JFR Jacob) – which intervened to liberate
> Pakistanis from
> the madness of Pakistan.
>
> What remained of Pakistan in 1971 became a plaything of
> the
> military-feudal-political elite who turned it into a back
> office for
> the outsourced wars of big powers. Three decades later,
> Pakistan
> represents state failure, religious extremism, terrorism,
> nuclear
> proliferation. Few dispensations have failed their people
> on the scale
> that Pakistan has: it exists solely to provide subsistence
> to the
> military establishment.
>
> Within the next 20 years, Pakistan as we know it today will
> probably
> not exist. Built on the idea that differences between
> people must
> ultimately culminate in permanent division, Pakistan has
> become a
> victim of the very logic that created it: from Karachi in
> the
> south-east to Peshawar in the north-west, Jinnah's children
> are
> carrying his divisive message to its logical extreme. The
> tragedy is
> that this is not an aberration, but the acme, of the idea
> of Pakistan.
>
>
> --
> My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same
> poverty.
> - Jorge Louis Borges
>
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